"With Ubuntu we had the opportunity to make the first class distribution that KDE deserves, in Kubuntu we have now done that" said developer Jonathan Riddell.

Ubuntu's founder Mark Shuttleworth commented "KDE is a profoundly important part of the open source world - it's popular with both end users and developers and is one of the key pieces in the battle for the future of the desktop. I'm very excited to support this community effort to get KDE into Ubuntu."

I don't think I have to fulfil the duty of copying a mailinglist archive here. If you know what this is about you can easily look it up yourself at the right place. (If not say so and I'll happily point you to some KDE mailinglist documentation page where you can get all neccessary info and more.)

I replied to you personnally though... A small OT discussion started, etc.
The lists are not dead. It's just that you're not subscribed at the right
place, we changed list with the project rename (Kalyxo) since some users where
confused and asking things on list that was in fact directed to the debian
developers. You were not even aware of this...

Don't take this as a personal attack, but please stop to ask people working
on Kalyxo to go working on Kubuntu. That's a different kind of work currently,
it's sometimes even complementary and some things in Kubuntu comes from our
work. But well... you've hardly been involved enough in Kalyxo during the past
year to notice this.

I have to admit that we're maybe not communicating enough outside the core
people involved. That's probably our biggest mistake, but well... we dislike
to claim we have something when it's not good enough (following our own
criteria).

As a side note, I'd like to add that (K)ubuntu is mostly a Debian fork (even
if it's the most respectful Debian fork I know, some of their improvements
going back to Debian). Kalyxo on the other hand is trying to improve the
situation directly for people using official Debian and KDE. We're trying to
improve both projects and their integration, not to fork one of them.

It used to be that Debian was very fast with having new kde releases available in the 'unstable' branch. This time it seems to be taking long for KDE 3.4 to make it into 'unstable'. It would not surprise me if some Debian users are now Kubuntu users in part because of this.

That means next two years without new kde... That's why I'm after 2 years of using Debian switched to Kubuntu. Debian sucks with their releases. Most of users use unstable / testing branch or Woody with backports.

Debian is losing interest because they don't bother to put newer (and more stable) packages of popular programs into their releases. It has been 2 years and still there is no updates to KDE. Pathetic. There have already been 5 major releases of KDE in that time period and still not a SINGLE update. They don't even plan on putting KDE 3.4 into the next release. And KDE3.4 is the latest KDE!

Why would they do that? It doesn't make sence at all. There is no reason to be releasing software with KDEs's several versions older than what is currently out and currently also more stable.

You don't have the slightest idea of what STABLE is when you're talking about Debian, STABLE contains stuff that hasn't crashed for what is it 2 years???
Kubuntu and KDE3.4 ran for 5 minutes on my system before Konqueror crashed on me.

Well, I am currently in exactly the situation you describe. I have been running Debian testing/unstable for over a year, and tried Ubuntu Warty once when it first came out. Decided I really _did_ like KDE that much better, and booted back to Debian within the hour. Now that Kubuntu is out, I installed it this morning, and have been enjoying it ever since.

The Good:
* It's so similar to Debian, I can copy config files, apt-get, change locales and so forth just like before.
* It's wicked fast. My Debian seems bloated in comparison, but that might be because of KDE 3.3 or because I let it grow bloated (remember, everyone creates his own Debian)
* It was very easy to install and includes almost all software I regularly use right on the CD. Exceptions: German localization, KDE development stuff, ethereal, xosview

The Bad:
* Not many repositories as of yet. My university (www.rwth-aachen.de) alone has a couple of Debian repos.
* MPlayer had to be compiled from source (Marillat package had dependency problems)

The Undecided:
* It doesn't support as many architectures as Debian does. This is however no serious problem, as Kubuntu isn't really the OS you'd want on that big-iron IBM or that 33 MHz PDA anyway.

Not to sound like a troll, but debian remains in the stone age. KDE2.2 is their latest stable release. That is FIVE major KDE versions ago. FIVE.

Since testing and unstable aren't releases anyway, there is no guarantee you can keep track of debian proper while using them without breakage. So what is the downfall of using kubuntu (which is just a stabalized tracking of Sid)? Kubuntu is just the same that you and I do with Debian Unstable in our own homes. Only it is done out in the open with cooperation. This allows people who wish to track Sid on their computers to track Sid more reliably, and with better support, performance, and features. Debian Sid still doesn't have 3.4. Why not? They said that 3.4 will not go into sid until the next version is released. Why not? 3.4 is proven better and more reliable than 3.3. So why would they release an OLDER and BUGGIER version of KDE into an operating system which isn't even released yet?

I'm a big fan of Debian. And I use it. No disrespect for Debian. It's a great distribution. But it won't remain for long if it keeps being outstripped because of their stubbornness to not release reasonably modern desktops.

I tried it last night (the live version) and got really impressed!
After booting there are few menu-driven questions and in a couple of minutes (yes, my cd-drive is so slow) you have it up and running.

It looks clean, polished, it's fast and has the best selection of kde apps available around. Amarok startd up immediately and was configured by pressing next->next->next->done :-). Kopete looks gorgeous along with all other kde apps, including k3b, kaffeine, kolourpaint, ..., kpdf (ehm.. I'm a little biased here :-).

Every chip in my hardware was recognized and set up appropriately, even the sound was crisp and at a good default volume even without KMIXing it :-).

Never had a single crash or problem, so what can I say.. If I wasn't so addicted to compiling sources I'd immediately left gentoo for that. Good work Jonathan!.